Do they sit on our shoulders?
This is, as many essay titles happen to be, a pretty convoluted way of asking a far simpler question. We’ve been introduced to Thespis, so we’ve got an inkling of the several characters that constitute ‘they’, and as they were sitting across from me in a chair of the same size we can conclude that they won’t be perching on my neck anytime soon. Obviously some serious nonsense is being chattered here, but I’m writing this essay as something of an introduction to the series of short stories I plan on writing. With that in mind, the question I really want to pose in this essay and the stories as a whole, is ‘ Who are the figures that comprise a human soul, and where and how do they live?’
But something tells me you wouldn’t have started reading if I’d called it that.
After all, you just came here for some short stories, and here I am demanding you tell me the exact nature of the human soul. Don’t worry, we will get to the short stories and they’ll be a damn sight more exciting than this, but in order for any of the following stories to make sense I probably need to explain the thought process that led me here. So, where does the soul live? We have lots of different words for the ‘soul’, and it seems to me that many of them are linked to different body parts. Conscience, our angels and devils, sit on our shoulders so they can whisper seditious thoughts of microwaving forks or not embarrassing a friend by letting them know that there’s food in their teeth. Instinct, a collection of quickfire emotions that all seem to boil down to the many, varied uses of the term ‘yeet’, lives in our gut, which we ‘go with’ when we aren’t quite sure what to do. Do you know exactly where your gut is? I don’t. I’d have to look it up. It is a specific organ, right? And finally, those emotions that come upon us with overwhelming strength, refusing to budge for hours, days, weeks on end, we resign to the heart. But is that the only place these moods live? We talk about hearts breaking, but also of butterflies in our stomach or lumps in our throat. And these are just superstitions passed down to a twenty-something white boy in rural Southern England. We cross our fingers for good luck, but in Ukraine they clench their fists. How did we come to make these associations between emotions and body parts? More importantly, why do we confine the signals of our soul to our body?
I hate to be presumptuous, but I’d like to think that I can’t have been the only person in the world to have had feelings that seem to push at me, from the outside in. It sounds quite wanky, but let me clarify with some examples. Lying in a dark bedroom, listening to playlists of favourite songs and fixing your eyes to the darkness until you lose all conceptions of time and space. Walking through the country until you suddenly realise that you haven’t formed a full thought in several minutes. Engaging in a conversation with a friend so deeply that you feel a door opening, something walking out and something walking in. These are all very particular examples for me, but I’m sure you’ve got your own .
Ok, so that didn’t really get any less wanky. But if we can find a soul in landscapes as well as portraits what does a soul look like? If, for the sake of having an actual setting for a story, we imagined the soul as a series of habitats, what sweeping architecture could possibly comprise the innermost lattices of the human condition?
I don’t know if you’re at all familiar with the Wiltshire area of Southern England, and the relatively unremarkable (if scenic) countryside of the Vale of the White Horse, but if we’re talking about the scenery that has built me I can’t really offer you anything more grandiose. Abandon all visions of gothic castles or sci-fi cityscapes, but at the very least in exhange for a relatively pleasing pastoral vista. Our scene will be set amongst the pubs and marketplaces of rural towns and villages, as well as their surrounding fields, forests, hills and riversides, for the most part. This section of the English countryside is quaint, but can transform from the familiar to the unknown as quickly as a Disney Princess getting lost. Its this malleability that I think makes the Vale of the White Horse a good setting for the story of the soul, but above that its the fact that I know it well, and the personal relations I share to certain areas will undoubtedly make their way into the story at certain stages. I hope that as I grow more confident in writing these stories that starting with my natural habitat will give me more ways to make it feel unnatural, ethereal, scary, as we go along. But the soul isn’t a ‘fixed’ thing, so why should this soul-place be one location? I’ll be sure to mix things up in places, and merge other locales in for whatever fits the plot, or the characters, or what the characters think fits them best.
And what about the characters? If the soul is a place, who lives there? Well, as you might’ve guessed from Thespis we’re getting allegorical, straight up Miltonic in here. I thought about having the soul inhabited by basic emotions, but how do you flesh out a character based on Happiness or Anger? What else do those characters feel? Better writers than me might be able to make that work but I’m going to need something a little more complex. So lets consider emotions the building blocks of the soul instead. They shape the world, and they fill its characters. Some of the characters will represent worldly forces, as Thespis and his friend Music do, some more complex emotions such as Anxiety or Resolve, and others qualities that I can’t be bothered to properly categorise, like Clarity. I don’t want to limit what concepts can take root in a person, nor the ways that can happen - inspiration, indoctrination - so we’ll keep a relatively open mind here. Lets also (although I may regret this) consider them living beings. They need to eat, sleep and breathe and they have physical bodies. Do they need money? Have jobs? Haven’t gotten that far yet. What happens when one of these figures dies? We might just have to find out.
So there we go. We’ve got a full world of living beings. Living, but not human. There’s one more distinction I’d like to make. I spoke earlier about shoulder angels and devils, and you know what, that might be a fun distinction to keep around. But its the 21st century, fuck binaries! I’ve got no time for binaries, particularly concerning a supposedly objective view of good and evil, and I’m sure you don’t either. But if a soul society (please don’t sue me Tite Kubo) must have a social heriarchy, if only to reflect its owner and the world he lives in, I think we could start with a worse distinction than between Order and Chaos. So that will be how power is divided in this interior world. There are Angels of high and low Order and Demons of High to Low Chaos; the closer to the middle line the more ‘human’ one might appear, whereas those that tend strongly to one or the other are more abstract and more powerful - in theory. Thespis, for example, is a low Demon - Chaotic, but with an inkling towards order that makes them practically human, a divide which their best friend Music mirrors as a low Angel. Lets get back to them and their friends, shall we?